There are various modes of communication used today, including telephonic communication, facsimile communication, and electronic communication, as examples. In recent years, electronic communication has become a preferred medium of communication for many businesses and individuals. Electronic communication includes electronic mail, also known as email or e-mail, and instant messaging, as examples. The preference for electronic communication stems from the many advantages that are provided by this mode of communication. People have always wanted to correspond with one another in the fastest way possible. Electronic mail is advantageous over regular mail in this respect as it provides a near instantaneous form of communication. Prior to e-mail, first telegraph, and then later facsimile, provided similar instantaneous forms of communication, but in both cases, the steps leading to sending and then ultimately steps involved in receiving this instant communication were burdensome. By contrast, once means of communication is established, electronic mail or other electronic communications do not provide any additional burdens either for the sender sending the communication or the receiver receiving the communication.
The popularity of electronic communication has lead both individuals and businesses to rely heavily on this form of communication. Electronic communication allows people to write back and forth without having to spend much time worrying about how the message actually gets delivered. As technology grows closer and closer to being a common part of daily life, the reliance of both individuals and businesses on this medium of communication is sharply increasing.
Electronic communications rely on addresses to send/receive messages. For instance, an e-mail address provides the information required to get a message to a user or business anywhere around the world. Other forms of electronic communication, as well as other forms of communication, also rely on addresses or other forms of identity. In sending the communication, the sender can type in an e-mail address or more conveniently, a name of the recipient. The name is then used as a look-up to find the associated e-mail address.
Within most large enterprises that use commercial e-mail software, there exists a classic problem of misdirected e-mail among employees. When a sender decides to send a communication to a recipient, the sender types in, for instance, a name of the intended recipient in the To:, cc:, and/or bcc: fields of their e-mail client application program. Most e-mail client software packages attempt to use the entered name to look up any previous entry in the sender's personal address book associated with the e-mail client software package. In some cases such an entry is not found, which is typically the case for first or otherwise casual infrequent contacts.
In an enterprise class e-mail client software package (such as Lotus Notes® offered by International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y.), when a personal address entry does not match, automatic steps are in place to assist in identifying the intended e-mail recipient by referring to a universal address and names book (a.k.a, universal or enterprise address book). For large enterprises with distributed e-mail packages running on multiple servers across varying geographies, this enterprise address book is periodically replicated among the various servers. As an example, Lotus® Domino® e-mail servers, offered by IBM®, are strategically located at various geographically dispersed locations where they accommodate local e-mail clients, such as Lotus Notes® clients. The servers communicate with each other across the enterprise's intranet or perhaps the internet, exchanging the e-mail traffic from users they serve within their local/respective geographies. (Lotus Notes®, Lotus® Domino®, and IBM® are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., U.S.A. Other names used herein may be registered trademarks, trademarks or product names of International Business Machines Corporation or other companies.)
When the sender types the name of an intended recipient whose associated e-mail address is not in their personal address book, their associated enterprise server (e.g., Domino®) then queries the shared enterprise address book for a candidate entry. The entry is retrieved, and that entry includes information used to forward the e-mail to the intended recipient. The mail server that locally serves the intended recipient user is extracted from the selected entry and a copy of the final composed e-mail is sent to the responsible local e-mail server where it is held for delivery or viewing for the intended recipient at that location.
Unfortunately, however, there are times when the wrong entry is selected. This can occur for many reasons. For example, this may occur when the user has phonetically typed, but misspelled, the intended recipient's name into their e-mail client, and that misspelled name correctly spells a uniquely defined entry, a wrong entry, that exists in the universal address book.
In other cases, the ubiquitous “auto-fill” feature may automatically fill in the various names encountered in the universal address book that match the intended-recipient's name seemingly perfectly. For instance, assume an e-mail is to be sent to Thomas J. Watson, Jr. By typing in Thomas J. Wats, the e-mail system may fill in Thomas J. Watson as having been found in the universal address book. The user will often simply accept this offered entry and send it. Unfortunately, the intended recipient was instead Thomas J. Watson, Jr. (requiring the Jr. suffix) and this intended recipient does not receive the correspondence.